Playing with Amazon’s aStore

I’ve been playing with Amazon’s new aStore. Instead of adding each individual book link (that takes your viewer straight to Amazon’s main site), you can create an ‘aStore’ within your own site. You get to choose which books appear with a few simple clicks and you can customise the look of the page. Your website reader can browse your books and add them to the shopping basket all whilst remaining on your site.

There are three ways you can integrate the aStore into your site.

  1. Link to store direct on Amazon, simple to use but not very integrated – e.g. http://astore.amazon.co.uk/advancedhtml-21.
  2. You can embed the aStore in a frame – only useful if frames will fit in with your site.
  3. Embedded in any page using an iframe. e.g. http://www.advancedhtml.co.uk/htmlbooks.htm

I’ve gone for the 3rd option as this is the one that looks most integrated with Advanced HTML. There is one side effect. As you can see from the HTML code below the default height is set at 4000 pixels.

 <iframe src="http://astore.amazon.co.uk/advancedhtml-21" 
 mce_src="http://astore.amazon.co.uk/advancedhtml-21" 
 width="90%" height="4000" 
 frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

It causes your web page hosting the aStore to be very tall. There is a good reason for this; if you move to a specific product page, the product reviews are shown in the iframe. If you change the height to be less than 4000 then some of your product links may have truncated reviews.

I’ve decided to leave the height at 4000, and just make sure that any page which has the aStore doesn’t have any content after the iframe.

One Comment on “Playing with Amazon’s aStore”

  1. I am trying to figure out a way to include astore on my wordpress. They give different ways . 3 to be exact. However the sad part is that search engines look at the frames as links. Anybody know how to fully integrate this astore so it is indexable. Talking about a bad store now that would be hot.

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